News Corp gives up on its Knewz aggregator after 18 months

Knewz, the news aggregation site created by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to attempt to gain some leverage against Google and Facebook’s control over what articles users read, is dead. The website, curated by a mix of artificial intelligence and real breathing editors, lasted just 18 months before shutting down, presumably because News Corp began to get concessions from both Google and Facebook.

The garishly yellow front page of Knewz is gone, but you can still see its farewell message (and a plug for other News Corp sites). According to Knewz, it had provenance, “but not profits.”

Knewz tried to bill itself as a publisher-friendly aggregator, pulling from sources big...

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